Ow, ow, ow

So my editor mentioned in passing that she "really gave it to me" on two of the chapters.

Here's what she means.



Every page in the chapter looks like that. On several, the notes continue onto the back.

That was a long week

So I got the edits back on the book and USS Mariner went down. Three days later, it came back up today. A brief chronology:
Wednesday:
- Carl Everett is tossed off the team, and then the M's trade for Ben Broussard. USSM sees a huge traffic spike that takes down the shared webserver and the shared database server. Our host shuts the site down.
- We eventually get a temporary page where I can start throwing up straight HTML updates. Good thing I was around back in the old days and know how to write those. You want Ajax and Web 2.0? I offer the h2 tag, and use ordered lists.
- Using parts from my last PC and stuff I've had hanging around, I build a new server

Thursday:
- At about 2 in the morning, I got up and drove to Enumclaw to volunteer for RAMROD
- At about 6:45, I drove home. This took forever.
- I get home, finish up prepping the server, and drive it Tukwilla. On the way down, I see that 405 North is just as bad as it was when I tried to get hom earlier.
- I take I-5 N back from Tukwilla to I-90. I-5 is a crawl.
- At some point, the hosting guys tell me they expect they'll have the box ready later that night. That doesn't happen.
- I go to sleep, exhausted from having slept maybe 2 hours since USSM went down

Friday:
- ETA for the new box is that evening. That turns out to be 8, when I get an email that I should check the box and then call in if it's cool.
- At about 8:20 I call in and get put on hold. I take the "leave us a message" option, but it blips and says "no message to send" and there's no option to re-record or anything.
- I file a support request
- I call back in and sit on hold for 45m, during which I bitch to Jeff Shaw on IM
- I give up and go to sleep

Saturday
- At eleven, having heard nothing, I call in and get someone, who promises to look into it and call me back
- I call back sometime after noon, and they've made no progress. We both work on it while on the phone and bring it up at about 2

I have a lot of mixed emotions about the whole thing. On the one hand, yeah, we're around in large part because of digital forest's largesse, so I understand that we're getting their tech's support as it's available, and got bumped every time a paying customer had any kind of issue. I totally understand.

But from my side, this was three days of troubleshooting, slipped estimates, during which my blood was 90% stress and 10% caffeine. It was three days to getting my box online, and if that hadn't worked, I don't know what I would have done next - I was considering buying a rack server from Dell and having it overnighted, and that would have been a couple thousand dollars, maybe.

Or turning out the lights.

Anyway, it's back to the book revisions. It sucks that I can't celebrate the resurrection of USSM with a rush of joyous content, but I've only got a few weeks before I need this draft turned around, and the book, unfortunately, has to be a priority right now.

It begins agaaaaaaaaaaaain, again

Cracked open the manuscript to start revisions on version three. Right now, they look thankfully far less massive compared to the last set, though of course you don't really know until you get into it.

This ought to be fun.

The secret of the Aerobee Aeropress

Tinker with the grind. After some experimentation, I'm getting some really stellar coffee. It really does make a remarkably smooth, sweet cup of coffee, with little of the nasty side effects that come with a french press or other devices.

Check out this review at Dan's Data for a really good overview.

I'm starting to really see the difference in beans, which is something that largely used to escape me (on the other hand, I once voluntarily drank Keystone Light on a regular basis, but in my defense, I was broke).

Sonics bleating falls on deaf ears

I'm a guy who has been really interested in the economics of baseball teams and their relationships with their communities, I found the cries of the Sonics ownership group familiar and tiring, and I've pretty much tuned them out. It's the same story every city hears about every franchise, but the short version is "waaah, we're not making money, we need further taxpayer subsidies in the form of crazy-low leases/civic improvements/tax concessions/etc".

I didn't believe the Sonics were any different than any other pro franchise that cries poor while making money hand over fist one way or another. A revenue-sharing lease? How horrible for them. Someone find me a suitable hankie at once, so that I may dab at my eyes. I didn't follow it closely enough to really comment, though, so I let it go.

But I won't get particularly fancy here. Take, just for a second, the claim that the Sonics are a horrible, money-losing louse of a team, bound for bankruptcy.

Why would such a team sell for $350m?

The now-former ownership group paid ~$250m for it in 2000, right? So that's 100m in profit for holding the team for five years, a 40% return on their original investment in six years, and that doesn't count any payouts they extracted from the franchise directly, or tax write-offs they enjoyed.

I sometimes think about this like it's owning a classic car you don't drive. You keep it in the garage, you take it out for a spin every once in a while, keep it tuned and maintained, so every year it costs, say, $1,000 to keep in pristine condition. Each year it's in pristine condition, the value of the car goes up 10%. So this year it's worth $50k, next year it's $55k... but every year, you can claim, with a straight face, that you're losing money owning that beautiful Mustang.

Dog bites man. Sports franchise claims to be in horrible financial shape, makes owners huge amount of money on sale.

Moving around the music spectrum

Sigur Ros sounds a lot like OK Computer-esque Radiohead to me.

Roaring back into fiction

While on the STP, I also composed* a short, humorous science fiction story I'm now going to try and get published. It's been a long time since I tried to get fiction in a magazine, it'll be interesting to see how this goes.

* yes, in my head, I didn't have a notebook and pen out while pedaling

STP 2006: Walking through Napavine

~205 miles, about 13 1/2 hours total time. Left Seattle at about five, rolled over the finish line at about six thirty. Average total speed, including stops, of just over 15 miles an hour. It was overcast and cool for about the first half, with almost no wind at all, and then the second half it was sunny and 70-80f with a lovely tailwind of helpfulness.

In Napavine, we ran into the Napavine Fun Times Festival. The road through town was closed, and a cop told us we had to walk through town.

We all got off our bikes, and since we're almost all in clipless pedals and shoes, we have to do that awkward biker click-click walk for half a mile, which is uncomfortable. The Napavine Fun Times festival consisted of people driving things - old cars, logging trucks, giant pickups, and so on - down the main drag of town, and throwing candy out to kids and horribly obese mothers alike ("Throw me some candy!"). And even though the candy was wrapped, if it touched the ground no one touched it, so as we walked through town in a giant string, we had to try not to step on melting mini-Hershey's chocolate bars, mints, Tootsie Rolls.

As we walked down the main drag, we were like a continuous line of annoyed but silent ants next to the giant trucks and pickups, and the residents of Napavine made little jokes, delivered with a kind of flat or derisive tone, which I'll present here as generalized questions along with the answers I bit back.
Q: "Must be nice to get off those bikes for a minute, huh?"
A: No. It's hard to walk around in these shoes, for one, but it's also hard to get back on them after a half-mile of walking.

The announcer for the parade, as a flatbed hauled a race car of some kind around:
Q: "And here's (whoever) and his number one car, (whoever)'s been racing since... he could walk, I guess, and he's doing really well at it. There are some other folks in our parade today. They're probably grateful for the chance to slow down for a minute."
A: No. If you're trying to do Seattle-to-Portland in a day, you're on a pretty brutal schedule. I've done it a couple times and this is the first time I've finished with the sun shining on me. An average total speed, including stops, of 14 miles an hour gets you to Portland at about eight. Stopping, especially non-productive stopping at food stops, is a debt you're going to have to pay on the road.

Q: "Aren't you supposed to ride those things?"
A: Aren't you supposed to have more teeth?

Being forced to walk through town was annoying, but if Napavine wanted to hold their celebration that day, that's fine, and I mean that in total sincerity: I grew up alongside Renton's River Days and Kent's Cornucopia Days. Knock yourself out.

It would have just been annoying. It was the people being dicks about it, like it was funny the bikers were forced to walk alongside logging trucks and the guy on the horse who wanted people to vote for him for some position. They're under no obligation to be civil, really, though STP riders drop an immense amount of money in each town they ride through (at the cost of traffic disruptions and a certain amount of dickishness from a sliver of the rider pool). It was the eat-shit grins and our inability to do much but smile and nod or risk further delays and hassles (and I'm sure that occured to them).

What else? My training regimen was both a wild success and a potential horrible failure, which scares me. As a result of all my hill training, I tore up the hills: I often got frustrated with everyone grinding them out and would pull out and race by everyone else. It was strange, I felt like I really didn't understand why they were all going so slow.

Here's how crazy it was: I didn't notice any significant climbs beyond the legendary Hill in Puyallup, and the bridge over the Columbia was impressive but not tough. I know STP's regarded as pretty flat, but all of the hills that had ever caused me trouble were hardly notable.

The bad part was that the lack of time on the bike started to really hurt late in the ride, not so much in the legs but all the peripherals (if you know what I mean) and particularly my back and shoulders. It was a little miserable. If I hadn't been so fast and there had been another couple of hours ahead of me, well, I'd have taken more time at the rest stops available in the last 50 miles, and that in turn would have really pushed the time back.

So!
First 100 miles: piece of cake (no, really, it was)
Next 50 miles: somewhat tougher piece of cake
Last 50 miles: oooooooooooh man

The other thing that goes on, and I haven't really figured out a way to solve this short of forming my own group, is there are a couple reasons the last 50 sucks:
- much of it is long, unshaded, and boring
- very long uphill stretches that are particularly draining on the rider who has already done 150+ miles
- and a more complicated one

If you're biking, you can save 25% of your energy or more by getting behind someone (ignore wind for a second). So if I can go 18 miles an hour on my own at a normal effort, I could go much faster if someone's in front of me doing 21, say.

If you have a partner or a group of people, you can take turns working hard at the front and then dropping back to save energy, and together your average pace can be a lot higher than what you could do individually.

Early in the ride, it's fairly easy to find those groups to glom onto (and, if you're a courteous rider, take your turn at the front). As the ride goes on, they get harder and harder to find, because as the race goes on, they're ahead of you.

I got to the midway point at Centralia fast, for instance, having been a part of a couple of those groups, and my chance after that were still slim. And very late, when you're dying for someone to draft, almost everyone on the road with you is in the exact same condition, so you're drafting someone at 17 and resting a little but dragging your time down.

I need a posse, clearly. I'm thinking about hiring a team of domestiques. My friend Joel had this idea a couple of years ago, and every year in those last few hours I start to think about what a great thing it would be to be dragged into Portland.

Wow... it's done

Manuscript, unformatted: 192 pages. 89,385 words in 17 chapters. I added and cut a ton of stuff in this version.

Microsoft Word has, btw, been a huge pain in my ass through this whole thing in a way it's never been before. It's been unable to hold formatting, for instance, which is a ridiculous pain in the ass when I'm breaking chapters out, editing them, and pushing them back into the larger manuscript.

Anyway. Tomorrow's the Seattle-to-Portland. That ought to be fun. And by fun I mean "not really that fun at all".

Ding, order up. Well, sort of. Not really.

Second draft's revisions are done. Two quick chapters and I'll have this off, and we'll see what they say.

284

Got the sign-stealing stuff revised. A couple of cites to pick up and a possible move of part of it to another chapter that should be easy remain, but right now, the first revision's about 96% done, not including new material. I'm 96% exhausted.

I'm an idiot

In case you weren't already of that opinion

My resume's got all kinds of impressive, huge stuff, doing anti-fraud measures that saved millions of dollars, building out cryptography systems, whatever.

I can't get my Aeropress to make good coffee. I'm baffled. I think this means I get sent back to coffee from crystals or something.

Seriously, it's
- ground beans
- hot water
- a plunger

And all I've gotten out of it so far is some really weak stuff I wouldn't use to water a plant. I'm ashamed of myself.

The impact of one bug

I've been using Mozilla/Thunderbird since early versions. I've been through crappy point releases, weird UI, the whole thing. I'm starting to abandon it, though, because there's one serious bug that drives me nuts, and no one seems to care.

Say I'm in a text box, like the one I'm in right now. If I type one of a couple characters - the single quote ', the forward slash /, for instance, it brings up the find dialogue and then my text goes there.

The problem is that this doesn't happen every time (like it's not happening now) but it does happen most of the time, and I type really fast. So if I'm on USSM typing a post out and it happens, before I know it I've typed a whole set of words in there and I'm angry.

You can go search for this bug and find angry references, fixes that don't quite work, but there's no plans to fix it. So I'm drifting off to IE 7 and other browsers.

One bad UI bug, and I'm so frustrated and angry I'm tossing the product. If this was a shrink-wrapped piece of software, or a website issue, the lost sales would get this ripped out in a week, if that.

Bye Firefox. It was fun for a while.

Another chapter down

Remaining: ~3 chapters (one might get pulled back in)
New chapters: 1? That's going to be interesting.

Or, to put it another way -- 85% done with the revisions for this draft. This is exhausting.

It begins agaaaaaaaaaaaain

When I was a teenager, working at Target, I drank Coke like crazy. Or Pepsi, if it was on sale. For my lunch break, I'd buy a 2-liter bottle of whatever was on sale and drink it. The whole thing, sometimes. Coke, by the way, is by far the superior for the high-volume cola drinker. Pepsi's faults are much worse over the course of a can, much less a couple of glasses.

In college, I went through soda like crazy. I'd pile up cans on the help desk where I was working, and I kept pallets of the stuff in my room in case I ever decided to drink all six cans in the mini-fridge at once or something. I had trouble sleeping, my skin was pretty bad, and sometimes, after going through a string of Cokes, I'd feel my heart doing a hummingbird impression. So I stopped. I started to sleep well for the first time in years, my skin cleared up, and my heart's been fine. I didn't drink any cola of any kind for years (though I did go through Sprite (and Citra, for a while) like crazy during my time at Wireless). I didn't have anything significantly caffinated until maybe a year ago.

But I love the smell of coffee. I like the taste. So I started drinking it once in a while, not ordering a decaf when having a meeting over coffees with someone at work, and since then, it's been a long slide. Today I bought a grinder and made a drip cup for the first time in almost ten years.

I'll skip the philosophizing. I'm hoping I don't buy a $150 coffee grinder while I'm semi-employed, because I'm not sure a "required author tool" would get by.

Gasoline soaked tissue paper and matches indeed

My replacement iPod arrived today. It was all new-in-plastic and everything.

Didn't work. Doesn't output anything to the headphones. Wheeeeeeeeeeee!!

Search results

I do a ridiculous amount of searching, from random internet stuff to combing Proquest (and the totally broken Paper of Record, which has been returning blank results for some time now), and I've noticed something weird lately-- Google kinda sucks.

I don't know when it happened, because I used them exclusively for so long, but on a few things I was dissatisfied with, I threw the same query to MSN, and the results were way better. Yahoo, same deal. I'd heard complaints that Google's last re-indexing pretty dramatically screwed things up, but I'd never really noticed it.

I'm really surprised.

ooooooooooooh crud

So the good news is that my publisher keeps flipping out over the book. They're just loving it.

The bad news is they want to move the release date up.

I'd hoped that this would be a fairly lazy summer, with me working on the book, doing more research as required, getting some quality biking time in, and spending more time with my wife while I figure out what I want to do next.

That looks like it's not going to happen. I'm not sure how I should feel about this -- overjoyed or depressed. I'm both right now.